Survey123 Connect and G-Suite

[HaleyNelson]

Our agency is currently moving away from Microsoft Office to G-Suite. We will soon be losing Excel. Many of our employees utilize Survey123 Connect on a regular basis, and I feel as though things are going to get a bit tricky when we lose Excel completely. I was wondering if there is a more seamless way to build surveys using Google Sheets while still getting to see the live preview of the form with each save/without having to download the sheet and overwrite the version on my C: every time updates are made? Unless I am missing something, it seems that currently this cannot be done because I cannot change the path where surveys are stored? Setting Sheets as my default program also wont do the trick because a copy of the sheet is created in my google drive, and not on my C: 

Just looking for some insights and ideas. If anyone has had to go the Google route as well, and has any tips and tricks for making this process a little less painful, I would be extremely gracious to hear. I really don't want our folks to be turned away from utilizing such a great time/paper-saving program because of this G-Suite transition. Thanks a bunch!

[ZhifangWang]

Hi Haley,

Although it's tricky and may be only helpful to a specific survey, following steps could be a possible solution:

1. Install a tool from Google to allow syncing your files between G-Suite server and local drive in real time. I'm not familiar with G-Suite, but I think Google has the same tool as Download Google Drive  for personal Google Drive

2. If possible, re-map the local file location of the spreadsheet to the survey folder

3. If step 2 is not possible, you may want to use mklink command to re-map the file location

In such way, when you save the file in G-Suite, it will sync to your local disk in real time which will cause Survey123 Connect to refresh automatically since it's watching the local .xlsx file. 

[HaleyNelson]

Awesome, Thanks! Gonna test this today!

There's another issue that will likely get in the way of this work around that I forgot to mention. Most users are going to be losing admin rights on their computers as well... 

[DougBrowning]

I would just like to second allowing the path to the Surveys to change!

I lost my entire HD this past weekend.  And since our IT only backs up My Documents on the C drive I lost everything in Survey123.  Lucky the new 2.7 is much better about downloading the form (thankfully I had published the day before the crash and got everything back on a download - but one more day and months of work gone).

I just do not understand putting it buried in a part of the users drive that almost no one ever backs up (and an area that many VMs bar the user from even seeing).  Very bad spot where it is now in my opinion.

Really needs to be a network drive.  Many IT depts are locking out the C drive completely now.  In fact the last big Survey123 project I had was close to getting shut down simply because no C drive on our VMs.

thanks

[HaleyNelson]

Agreed 100%. If I could change the path for where the surveys are saved, many of my problems would be solved.

[ZhifangWang]

Hi Doug, Haley

We had the enhancement issue in our backlog and I've raised your voice there.

Before it's implemented, I think you could have a try of the mklink command mentioned above to solve the issue, which also supports mapping to a network location.

[HaleyNelson]

Thank you for all the help Zhifang Wang! It is very much appreciated.

This works great on the Survey123/Esri side of things. I'm now getting hung-up by Google and my own agency. I can get this to work in Google Drive Backup and Sync with my personal email account, but cannot get a symbolic link to function in Google Drive File Stream, which is what is required of us to use (agency G-Suite Drive vs personal Google Drive). The doc is pretty spotty, but I am pretty sure the symbolic link functionality is not yet available in Google Drive FS. Also, our users are going to soon be losing administrator rights on their computers, so running command prompt as an admin will not be allowed. If I can get the symbolic link to work with Google Drive FS, I could have the admins set up the symbolic links for end-users when needed, though this might get tedious as our S123 user group is pretty large and growing. I'm hoping, while we wait for Google Drive FS updates, to get an Open Source office program added to our agency's approved software list as a temporary fix.